Review: 'Hold These Truths' @ Barrington Stage, 5/25/19

Joel de la Fuente stars in the one-man play "Hold These Truths" at Barrington Stage Company. (BSC publicity photo by Scott Barrow.)

Joel de la Fuente stars in the one-man play "Hold These Truths" at Barrington Stage Company. (BSC publicity photo by Scott Barrow.)

Photo: Scott Barrow, Barrington Stage Company

Photo: Scott Barrow, Barrington Stage Company

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Joel de la Fuente stars in the one-man play "Hold These Truths" at Barrington Stage Company. (BSC publicity photo by Scott Barrow.)

Joel de la Fuente stars in the one-man play "Hold These Truths" at Barrington Stage Company. (BSC publicity photo by Scott Barrow.)

Photo: Scott Barrow, Barrington Stage Company

Review: 'Hold These Truths' @ Barrington Stage, 5/25/19

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PITTSFIELD, Mass. – The internment of American citizens of Japanese ancestry during World War II, among the more flagrant and shameful abrogations of our nation's values and constitutional principles, is rivetingly explored in "Hold These Truths" at Barrington Stage Company.

The production, directed by Lisa Rothe, opens the season on BSC's St. Germain Stage, and it is a showcase for the skills of a lone actor, Joel de la Fuente, whose physical and vocal changes bring to life 20 or more characters. The main one, a man who defied the internment order and was not vindicated for more than 40 years, is Gordon Hirabayashi. Author Jeanne Sakata, who was in the audience for Saturday's opening night, interviewed Hirabayashi extensively to write the play, which premiered in Los Angeles in 2004 under the title "Dawn's Light"; according to a note in the script being used for this production, the play is in its 17th draft. Hirabayashi died at age 93 in 2012, and was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest honor for civilians, a few months later.

The story starts with teenage Gordon, the son of Japanese immigrants living near Seattle in the mid-1930s. Though xenophobic attitudes and racist, exclusionary policies are prevalent, the family has learned to navigate them, and Gordon heads to college at the University of Washington, where he pursues the Quaker faith and is generally is welcomed by white classmates.

Tensions, mounting as America edges toward participation in the war, explode after the attack on Pearl Harbor, but Gordon still refuses to believe his family's heritage could be used against them by the government. He tells his mother, "That's impossible. The Constitution protects us, 'cause we're American citizens."

And yet it happened: Fear-mongering among military and political leaders about potential espionage by Japanese-Americans – suspicions never so explicitly leveled at German- and Italian-Americans in the same period – led to an order from President Roosevelt that relocated at least 110,000 people of Japanese descent to concentration camps in the western U.S. Almost two-thirds of them were American citizens.

Gordon refuses to register or relocate, leading to arrest, conviction and jail time, though the play makes clear that many tasked with punishing him had little taste for it, including a prosecutor who let him travel 1,600 miles on his own to report to a work camp and a marshal who, lacking proper paperwork, kept trying to set Gordon free.

Sakata's story, seamlessly told by de la Fuente and Rothe on a stage that's bare except for a suitcase, a few chairs and a window at the back, moves us easily through the years and the legal cases, all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, which rules against Gordon. It's a sickening history lesson, richly illuminated by one man's story, that dips into didacticism slightly in the last 10 minutes. But this is a lesson that needs to be repeated, stridently if necessary, because as today's headlines remind us daily, affronts to the Constitution by those at the the highest level of American power isn't only a sad fact of history.